Ghost riding on a ledge
Posted July 4th 2017
In the outdoor areas of the first half of the level, there's a lower and an upper ledge. The basic idea of this fun is to get a Ghost onto a ledge and enjoy some novel driving. The upper ledge looks like being the best candidate by far, as it tends to be wider and flatter. That's the one I targeted for my first attempt. Specifically, I targeted the upper ledge in the first outdoor area.
To get the Ghost up, you'll need to harvest plenty of frags from Marines. For that, you'll surely want to use my trick for getting seven extra Marines, because extra Marines means extra frags. You may also find it worthwhile to get an extra hog, because then you'll have a Marine-retaining hog, which can be useful in doing the Marine killing. What I do is leave that hog in position and kill chain-gunners, one after another. Because they're dying in the same place, the frags tend to accumulate in a relatively tight pile, which I think is best. I use the other hog for ferrying Marines to the vicinity, to then get them into the Marine-retaining hog.
Each Marine has either 1 or 2 frags to drop, but when you kill him, it's random whether he drops his allocation. For that reason, the thing to do is get a delayed checkpoint prior to killing each Marine (you can use tunnel checkpoints), so you can retry if needed. That way you can maximize your harvest. Everyone contributes their drop allocation.
How many frags do you need? For launching to the upper ledge I think you'd better have at least 15 frags, or you may get frustrated with launches which are mostly too low (there's some randomness though, so you mayb get an unusually high launch occasionally). When launching in BCM249 I had 23 but that turned out to be more than needed. Maybe 18-20 would be ideal?
If there are any plasmas around, they can potentially be used as well (you can move them into position with Banshee blasts). You can also cause an extra bit of boost by tagging the Ghost just before it goes airborne (as seen at the start of BCM242).
Preferably have your launch position somewhere suitable for launching to a relatively wide and flat section of ledge. With BCM249 I didn't do that, because I was adapting an old save in which 16 frags had already been accumulated for launching a Ghost to the bridge. As a result, I suffered a lot from the launched Ghost bouncing or sliding off the ledge - because it was hitting quite sloped areas. I was in a Banshee so I could potentially try to keep the Ghost from sliding off, but it was hard to reach the ledge fast enough.
When you eventually succeed in getting a Ghost up, get a delayed checkpoint to serve as a starting point for your riding fun. Thereafter, you can explore to see how far you can drive. Some bits of ledge can be troublesome (though it's surprising what the Ghost is able to handle), and some bits are just plain impassable.
Driving along, it can be fun to blast the cliff to cause rubble to fall down in your vicinity. Another recreation is to float down to a bridge (where there might be some covies to slay, depending on how you set things up), and potentially then float down to the lower ledge or (more likely) bounce off it to the ground. These drops may only be viable for PAL Xbox though; I can't vouch for NTSC/PC.